Loire Valley Lodges

At Loire Valley Lodges, breakfast travels by rope. It is ordered the night before, left in a wicker basket beneath the treehouse and hauled up by pulley to the terrace, four metres above the forest floor. As introductions go, it is a good one, for a hotel made up entirely of treehouses: twenty-one wooden lodges on stilts scattered through three hundred hectares of private woodland twenty minutes from Tours, where nobody comes knocking unless invited.

The land belongs to Anne-Caroline Frey, a former Paris art dealer, and her husband Bertrand, who grew up in the area. They spent more than fifteen years restoring the old farmhouse and barn before the first treehouses opened in 2020, and then handed each lodge to an artist. Few hotels can say their rooms were decorated straight from an art dealer's address book.

Stepping inside a lodge feels like walking into a different artist's head. In one, a New York street scene sprawls behind the bed, while in another the chestnut walls are covered in handwriting. What they share is the view, nothing but oak and Douglas fir through tall windows, and a hot tub waiting on the terrace at body temperature for whenever the mood strikes. There is no television and no wifi, just a radio for calling the staff, and within a day nobody misses the rest.

Cars are banned beyond reception, so guests get about by bike on flat paths. A sculpture trail winds through the woods, starting with a giant bronze bull terrier at the entrance and including a cow painted in camouflage, which is exactly as hard to spot as it sounds. The wild boar, who live here too, are rather better at it.

Dinner is at Ardent, the restaurant in the farmhouse, where much of the produce comes from the estate's young organic farm and the wine from a Vouvray domaine run by the owners' sons. Desserts borrow from the trees, flavoured with Scots pine or spruce, so the stroll home to the lodge smells faintly of pudding.

It is a place for couples who want to switch off properly. Days drift between forest bathing, which here means a slow wander with the phone left behind, and a sound bath in a wooden pavilion shaped like an acorn, where most people quietly doze off. The only real effort is getting here, by car or taxi from the station at Tours. Swimmers should know that the pool is unheated, and anyone who needs to stay online will spend a lot of time near reception.

Next day the basket rises again, with farm eggs and a shot of birch sap, and an egg cooker waits in the lodge, so nobody even has to get dressed. Room service here has been reduced to a rope and a little trust, and it works beautifully.